Here's Michael Bérubé reviewing a new book by Alan Sokal:
It's not technocratic, it's pragmatic.
... we have a science-studies scholar criticizing postmodernism and stumping for creationism, religious fundamentalists calling on God to smite the infidels, and “ethical realists” arguing for a moral absolutism. Sokal is appropriately alarmed by the first two of these phenomena, but, unfortunately, his book’s closing argument—which, again, echoes that of Harris—is that all human beliefs should be judged by the degree to which they are supported by verifiable empirical evidence. That rationalist dog just won’t hunt; not only will this argument fail to convince the religious, it even fails to account for strange, counterintuitive utterances such as Thomas Jefferson’s.In place of Sokal’s (and Harris’s, and Richard Dawkins’s) “secular dogmatism,” then, perhaps we might consider a form of secular pluralism—a pragmatic pluralism that knows the world contains billions of people who believe things for which they have no good evidence, and that honestly comes to terms with the abiding dilemma of how to sustain secular pluralist societies that include people who are neither secular nor pluralist. Whatever his shortcomings with regard to science, Richard Rorty saw his life’s work as an attempt to secularize philosophy, to wean it from the notion that it is an enterprise analogous to physics; and as Alan Sokal undertakes the necessary task of struggling against religious fundamentalists, he may want to reconsider the value of pragmatism in human affairs. Then, perhaps, we can all move decisively beyond the hoax.
